The Green Hornet looks AWESOME. I hope I’m not proven wrong, but boy that looks like a fun movie. Who wants to see it? Well, let’s wait for the results from Metacritic (or Rotten Tomatoes). Then you can let me know.
For about the past twelve months, I’ve been convinced that I could design a better tumbledry than the one you see in front of you. With help from Mykala, Hoefler & Frere Jones, and Dive Into HTML5, that idea of improvement is becoming reality. I’m excited.
If you want to understand corporate America and/or nationalized healthcare it is critical that you read this four year-old-piece. Three years before GM went bankrupt, Malcolm Gladwell clearly articulated their problem in his New Yorker article “The Risk Pool”:
If the retiree obligations of Bethlehem Steel had been pooled with those of the much younger industries that supplanted steel—aluminum, say, or plastic—Bethlehem Steel might have made it. If you combined the obligations of G.M., with its four hundred and fifty-three thousand retirees, and the American manufacturing operations of Toyota, with a mere two hundred and fifty-eight retirees, Toyota could help G.M. shoulder its burden, and thirty or forty years from now—when those G.M. retirees are dead and Toyota’s now youthful workforce has turned gray—G.M. could return the favor. For that matter, if you pooled the obligations of every employer in the country, no company would go bankrupt just because it happened to employ older people, or it happened to have been around for a while, or it happened to have made the transformation from open-hearth furnaces and ingot-making to basic oxygen furnaces and continuous casting. This is what Walter Reuther and the other union heads understood more than fifty years ago: that in the free-market system it makes little sense for the burdens of insurance to be borne by one company.
The fundamental issue is the number of pensioners for each active worker. What’s particularly fascinating to me is that, during the strong times for unions in the 1950s, they (the unions) were overwhelmingly in favor of a government plan that managed their pensions and healthcare. They got it: a pension funded by diverse sources due to a generalized pool always has far far less risk than a pension dependent exclusively on the long term stability of a single company.
Mick Without Moss - The New York Times:
“You can delegate things to other people,” Jagger observes, “and you have to, to a certain extent, but if you’re not behind it and getting your knowledge and input into it, it’s not going to turn out as interestingly and probably it won’t be what you would like. It’ll be disappointing.”
Jeremy Messersmith - A Girl A Boy and A Graveyard:
She says, “Life’s a game we’re meant to lose.
But stick by me, and I will stick by you.”
Your favorite places aren’t that way because of their things and stuff, but because of their people.
I find this little car to be a very interesting vehicle. Sharp looks, good gas mileage, fun.
A giant sunroof, too! Well, in proportion to the car.
“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”
— John Milton
(Paradise Lost)
Here’s a good quote from jonknee in a discussion about the business of televising sports, network exclusivity, blackouts, etc.:
Football is infrequent enough that I can go to a bar, but if I went to a bar for every baseball game I’d be poor and drunk all the time.
Having got that previous post of life-threaten(ed) melodrama out of my system, it’s now time to confront the epidemic of cheating in schools.
Cheating, 2008
I left out an important detail when I told the story of my impossible first semester at dental school. It goes like this: shortly after receiving the news on the 12th of November, 2008 that I was mere points from failing two critical classes, I was in the library cramming for a histology quiz on which I could not afford to lose any points. A classmate of mine approached me.
“I’ve got the answers to the quiz, you know. They’re the same every year.”
“They are?”
“They are. I’ve got them right here. Would you like them?”
My classmate and I both knew the class was a farce, that 90% of the lecturers were spectacularly uninterested in educating us. We both knew the class was just the first of many hoops through which we were required to jump, for no real educational benefit. My classmate hedged their hours of studying with a sure thing: having the answers in hand. I couldn’t do it.
“No thanks.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I can’t accept those.”
At this point, I knew two things:
Cheating, 2010
Recently, Kottke brought the cheating topic back to the forefront of my mind. He posted a fascinating excerpt of a lecture from a University of Central Florida course director. In it, the professor describes his disbelief that one third of his 600 student class cheated on their October 2010 midterm:
To say I’m disappointed is beyond comprehension. Physically ill, absolutely disgusted, completely disillusioned, trying to figure out what the last 20 years were for. For those of you out there who acted ethically and acted honorably, and did it right, you have my undying gratitude and my utmost respect. For those of you who took the shortcut, don’t call me. Don’t ask me to do anything for you. Ever. Again.
It Get Worse
Modern cheating goes far beyond publisher’s test banks and crib sheets; the internet has extended the previous local connections between friends to a diverse network of full-time, well-paid paper ghostwriters. In a tremendously depressing article in The Chronicle Review called The Shadow Scholar, one of these paper generators describes writing for student customers:
Somebody in your classroom uses a service that you can’t detect, that you can’t defend against, that you may not even know exists.
I work at an online company that generates tens of thousands of dollars a month by creating original essays based on specific instructions provided by cheating students. I’ve worked there full time since 2004. On any day of the academic year, I am working on upward of 20 assignments.
In the midst of this great recession, business is booming. At busy times, during midterms and finals, my company’s staff of roughly 50 writers is not large enough to satisfy the demands of students who will pay for our work and claim it as their own.
People with money have always been able to buy their way through university. Now, when laziness and purchasing power combine, a façade of intellectual honesty can be maintained—the shadow writer doesn’t know their cheater’s identity—so the student isn’t singled out as a lazy cheater, even amongst their peers. Cheating is truly difficult to detect when one’s peers can’t even sniff it out.
Why?
When people try to understand the cheating problem and they are able to get past the incredible deceit students are willing to accept in exchange for good grades, criticism inevitably falls on “The System”. “This academic system is broken…”, they declare, “…a system that allows cheaters to succeed is not testing students correctly.”
This may be true. But, it jumps over the question of the individual to the question of their environment. Shouldn’t we first understand why students choose to cheat, and then try to fit these students into an academic setting?
Animals
After talking about the recent stampedes in Cambodia, Mykala and I came to rather general theory: when external pressures are sufficient, rational humans are quickly reduced to animals functioning entirely on instinct.
I believe this phenomenon explains some of cheating. Students are in hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt and their only way to repay is to get their degree and job. The specter of extreme financial pressure looms above the heads of these stressed out students. Losing their scruples, they claw and bite their way through a class using any means available. Cheating saved them from consequences, so they don’t see a problem.
Brains
What if debt doesn’t bother students? What if they’re rich? Perhaps they lack intellectual curiosity. A few comments from a discussion of “The Shadow Scholar” article:
There are some people who, irrespective of the work they put in, who will never be able to learn some things. I used to think that people were just lazy, but then I realized that many things are beyond most people. Don’t believe for a second that one day, everyone will be smart, uber-rational and we’ll all live in some Randian, Galt-led utopia.
Deep, critical thinking is not possible for most people. Through no fault of their own, they simply lack the mental hardware. I recognize that this view is very un-PC, but if mind is a function of matter as I believe, some people, regardless of what they do, will never be able to reason at a high level.
— oz
Uh oh. Now we’re in some truly dangerous depths. Sure, an inability to think would help explain cheating. But, if we believe some brains are physically inferior to others, the ideal of meritocracy is just the beginning of the collateral damage. Stratifying people and their brains by functional ability threatens to form the foundation of a rigid caste system. Suddenly, we’re at Gattaca’s doorstep.
Two possibilities explain a lack of intellectual curiosity: “I do not want to” and “I can’t”. Unfortunately, the outcome in both situations looks the same: the person is not curious. A more concrete example: am I unable to run an ultra-marathon because I lack “the hardware” or because I do not WANT to? How can we tell the difference?
I’m willing, however, to discontinue the debate about the processing power of different minds in favor of something else entirely more fascinating. What if there is social pressure to avoid intellectual curiosity? What faster way to ruin a good football conversation than subjecting folks around the water cooler with a dissertation about sports head injuries? Indeed, oz’s comment about people’s aptitude for thought sparked a reply addressing these social pressures:
I’ve known people who [are] capable of thinking deeply, but will do so only when cornered, and will resent whatever put them into that position. It’s not that they can’t; it’s that they have learned that there are social consequences when they do. They take away from the mindless fun of whatever group of people they are with when they start thinking about it.
Student’s social circles reward cheating:
People cheat because cheaters have more fun? Now I’m depressed.
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